An ever increasing amount of information is available through computing devices that are communicationally coupled to one another through computer networks, such as the ubiquitous Internet and World Wide Web. Consequently, users increasingly turn to search engines to find the information for which they are seeking. As will be known by those skilled in the art, such search engines provide searching services whereby they compile indices of the information available through interconnected computing devices that are communicationally coupled to such search engines and then let users efficiently search for information that is relevant to a search query provided by that user to such a search engine.
As will also be recognized by those skilled in the art, a substantial amount of information that is available through interconnected computing devices can be information that may be inappropriate for certain users. For example, children utilizing a search engine should not be provided with access to sexual or violent imagery. Typically, search engines provide such filtering through “safesearch” mechanisms, where the strictness of a safesearch setting determines how much inappropriate content is provided in response to a search query.
Unfortunately, many users are often unaware of their safesearch settings, or that such settings even exist. In such a case, a user may have saved search settings set such that content for which that user is, in fact, actively searching for may not be allowed to be provided to that user under those safesearch settings. Such a user, unaware of their safesearch settings, may come to the mistaken conclusion that the content for which they are searching is either unavailable, or cannot be found by that particular search engine.